Interventional medicine is the collection of medical procedures in which access to the site of treatment is made through one of the subject's blood vessels, body cavities or lumens. For example, angioplasty of a coronary artery is most often performed using a catheter which enters the subject's arterial system through a puncture of the femoral artery in the groin area. The procedure is referred to as PTCA, or Percutaneous (through the skin), Transluminal (through the blood vessel), Coronary (in the vessel of the heart), Angioplasty. Other interventional medical procedures include assessment and treatment of tissues on the inner surfaces of the heart (endocardial surfaces) accessed via peripheral veins or arteries, treatment of vascular defects such as cerebral aneurysms, removal of embolic clots and debris from vessels, treatment of tumors via vascular access, endoscopy of the intestinal tract, etc.
Interventional medicine technologies have been applied to manipulation of instruments which contact tissues during surgical procedures, making these procedures more precise, repeatable and less dependent of the device manipulation skills of the physician. Some presently available interventional medical systems for directing and manipulating the distal tip of the medical device by remote actuation use computer assisted navigation and an imaging system for providing imaging of the catheter and blood vessels and tissues. The system may also be configured to include a localization system for determining the position of the catheter or medical device in the localization system's own frame of reference translatable to the displayed image of the imaging system. In the absence of an explicit link between the localization system and the imaging and navigation systems, the localized device data is not readily available to control navigation of the device by computer-controlled means. The present invention provides a method for obtaining a registration between the display of a localization system and a navigation system, and a means for using the display directly to control device navigation.